I noticed that the track “Canon (Primo)” by Justice only has 5,815 plays on Spotify, even though every other track on the album has millions of plays. How is this possible? I know it’s just an interlude track that you wouldn’t listen to unless you’re listening to the full album, but still, this play count seems extremely low. What’s going on here? (I’m hoping my attached screenshot shows up here)
So I’m not a programmer but I work with a few and they told me that due to the way that certain processor architectures store integers as floating-point numbers, this can happen when a track is listened to exactly 5,815 times.
AFAIK to count as one play, a song needs to be played for more than 30 seconds (source: friend used to work at a record label), so to me it’s surprising it has any plays at all.
No I’m sure they’re under NDA, but this specific example doesn’t seem like it would provide anyone trying to game the system any insight the numbers don’t already provide, unless it was something like “the real counts are zero, the numbers are inflated.”
IOW doesn’t seem like a big deal. But I can understand most Spotify devs not wanting to risk it.
It seems that Spotify doesn’t accurately count plays for tracks under 30 seconds. I had a look through some of the albums I know of with short tracks and here’s what I found:
Humanz - Gorillaz / Most popular track: 214m plays vs 11 second interlude: 1,185 plays
Absolution - Muse / Most popular track: 259m plays vs 22 second intro: 32,174 plays
California - Blink 182 / Most popular track: 158m plays vs 16 second track: 42,616 plays
In fact I found the MGMT album 11•11•11 has a 26 second long track with no reported plays.
So while it’s probably true that people are listening to fewer full albums than they used to in the days of vinyl or CD, it seems more likely to do with Spotify only paying royalties on tracks over 30 seconds and the discussion surrounding that.
Mine are getting a bit of an upgrade… I found two 26" speakers ripped from an old stage set and a bag of identical tweeters in my dad’s old stuff, I’m currently soldering together a crossover circuit and an amplifier that won’t die while trying to run this whole mess; you can bet a bomb threat is gonna be called when genesis and waters of nazareth hit
Even on a streaming service if I hear a band i like that I’ve not heard before from a “radio” playlist I’ll go to that band and listen to whatever thier most popular album is.
I did for a bit with tapes and CDs, then didn’t for a good long while, but about a decade ago I got into vinyl, which I think is super cool because it’s somewhat difficult to drop the needle right where you want to… and at the same time, listening to one side of a record just feels like a much more atomic experience, and some artists actually build the album so that it adds another layer to the art.
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